Thoughts on faith, musings on Scripture, sermons from Falls Church Presbyterian Church, plus sermons and postings from "Pastor James," my blog while pastor at Boulevard Presbyterian in Columbus, OH.
(Note to FCPC members: this blog is meant for a wider audience than just FCPC. The things discussed here usually speak of the larger church and not FCPC in particular.)

Podcast

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

On Receiving Help and Love

The following was written for the upcoming church newsletter.

Dear Friends,

As some of you may well know, I
like to think of myself as strong and self-reliant. I’m convinced that I can
handle anything that comes my way. This has often served me well. During my
flying career an emergency didn’t rattle me. It was simply a problem to be
dealt with.

However, there is a significant
downside to my self-image. I can become very frustrated when I’m unable to do
something. There are plenty of things I know I’m not good at, but when I think
I should be able to do something but cannot, or do it poorly, I often beat
myself up pretty badly. To make matters worse, asking for help can feel like
failure. And so I’m not very good at either asking or receiving help.

That likely explains why only
after things got really bad, only after my wife had encouraged me for months,
did I seek help for a deepening sense of sadness, burnout, and depression. Even
then I hoped that a few sessions with a counselor would let me figure
everything out and quickly get back to “normal.” I certainly wouldn’t need
ongoing therapy or medication, a certainty that quickly disappeared.

I have a long way to go in
getting back to “normal,” whatever that is, but I hope I’m on the right path.
I’ll spare you any more details of what already feels to me like oversharing. I
felt compelled to share, however, for a couple of reasons. The first is that
I’m hardly the only person who puts off getting treatment for mental health
issues because it feels like admitting to failure or weakness. Perceptions have
changed in recent years, but there is still a stigma attached to mental
illness. I hope my sharing is one more small chip knocked out of that stigma.

I also see a faith dimension to
this. At a very basic level, Christian faith is about being open to receiving
help. Our Presbyterian/Reformed Tradition understands relationship with God and
faith itself as a gift freely given to us by a loving God. Jesus is the
embodiment of a love that is not earned but is simply received. One does not
merit or deserve it. Jesus doesn’t love me because I’m so lovable but because
God is so loving. But I tend to measure my own worth by what I accomplish. And
so I have trouble loving myself, much less believing that God could love me,
really love me.

Our society encourages a culture
of performance, and this emphasis on achievement seems only to be growing. We
began putting pressure on our children to perform, to do well, to engage in
“enrichment” activities and sports at an earlier and earlier age. No parent
means to say, “I’ll love you if you do well, if you are successful,” but no
doubt some of our children hear just such a message.

The church also gets caught up
in our culture of performance, but that is a distortion of the gospel. At its
heart, the gospel is and always has been counter-cultural. That is why is says
silly things such as the last shall be first, the poor are blessed, and being
part of God’s new day isn’t about more success but about letting go and
becoming more like a little child. (Children had little “worth” in Jesus’ day.)

As the church, we are called to
embody Christ and his gospel. That means being a community where people
experience the love of God that is not dependent on measures of performance or
success. That means being able to accept and love ourselves, and it means being
able to accept and love those around us whether or not they “deserve” it based
on our personal measures of success or worth. Perhaps there is no greater gift
we could give our children, our neighbors, or ourselves than to rest so fully
and completely in God’s boundless love in Christ that it transformed us into
agents of Christ-like love.